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Q&A: Francis Ford Coppola Explains His Passion For Wine

Famed director and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola is equally at home in his vineyards or behind the camera.

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is still best known for his movies, especially his early successes Patton, Apocalypse Now, and the mega-hits, The Godfather and the Godfather Part II, which have become two of the most lauded and popular films in history. All of these critically acclaimed bombshells were made in the 1970s, and while Coppola has continued to make films ever since, he has significantly turned his attention to a host of other commercial ventures, most notably winemaking. He has also opened a few boutique hotels in which he has been heavily involved, from Central America to Italy, and I wrote about his latest Italian property, Palazzo Margherita, here at Forbes.com.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Coppola about wine and his passion for it, and today we get to hear from him in his own words.

There are countless celebrity winemakers, mostly athletes, who have been entranced by the wine business, but it is safe to say none remotely approaches the scope or success Coppola has had. One reason is that he is no newcomer to the wine game – he purchased his first vineyard in Napa in 1975 using proceeds from The Godfather films, just a year after their release. After more than 35 years of winemaking, he has expanded his operations considerably, most recently with the 2010 grand re-opening of one of the most impressive public wine facilities in the world, a sort of oenophile fantasy land, Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Sonoma’s Alexander Valley.

Coppola's winery is capturing the essence of Sonoma terroir in its Director's and Director's Cut series.

I have always been a fan of Coppola’s wines, and actually visited his original Napa winery back in the late eighties. He subsequently purchased the famed Inglenook Chateau in 1995 and renamed his winery the Rubicon Estate. Later he purchased the rights to the Inglenook label and in 2011 renamed the estate again, to Inglenook.

But it is his Coppola branded wines that have always had my attention, because they have consistently delivered great value, especially in the mid-range price points, a step up from entry-level, with many quality wines in the high teens and twenties, which have delivered great bang for the buck year in and year out. He also makes scarcer wines selling for as much as $50. In particular I have been a consumer of his Diamond Label series, which sell for around $20 per bottle and are consistently delicious. I’ve bought the cabernet sauvignon, merlot and especially the claret, a traditional Bordeaux-style blend that goes great with food.

Until recently I had only tried his wines as one-offs when I bought them, but the winery recently sent me a sampling of the excellent labels being produced in Sonoma. Coppola makes a wide range, dozens of bottles, and I haven’t had a chance to taste them all, but I did sample some of the varietals in his flagship Director’s and Director’s Cut series, and they were standouts for both taste and value, offering a top tier small production craft experience at under $30. The Director’s Cut features limited production wines (Cabernet, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir and a red blend called Cinema) from grapes grown in designated sub-appellations of Sonoma. The Director’s series features four popular varietals (Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir) using grapes grown all across Sonoma County. By blending from different micro-climates, the winery strives to create wines with lush fruit and soft tannins, and based on the ones I have tried, they have greatly succeeded.

After opening some critically acclaimed boutique hotels, Coppola applied his showmanship background to the wine business, and his Sonoma facility, Francis Ford Coppola Winery, features elaborate wine tasting bars and tours, two restaurants, a swimming pool, movie gallery (with Academy Awards, costumes and props on display), performing arts pavilion and park with game tables and bocce courts. Coppola decided to pattern it on Copenhagen’s famed Tivoli Gardens and brought on Academy Award-winning production designer Dean Tavoularis – who worked on The Godfather – to design the place. In a release about the facility, Coppola called it “a wine wonderland, a park of pleasure where people of all ages can enjoy all the best things in life – food, wine, music, dancing, games, swimming and performances of all types. A place to celebrate the love of life.”

Not many wineries feature elaborate public pool complexes, but the Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Sonoma is an exception.

The elaborate pool includes a poolside café and 28 day cabins for rent. The main restaurant, Rustic, focuses on Italian specialties and Neapolitan pizza, while the adjacent Parilla offers Argentinean-style grilled meats over wood flames. The family-centric winery has a wide variety of children’s games and experiences and the actual winery tours include unusual options such as a guided hike, while wine tasting options are equally varied, with about 40 different bottles to choose from. Concerts and special events are held throughout the year. Just as there is no filmmaker quite like Coppola, there is no winery experience quite like his Sonoma winery.

Where does all this passion for wine and the wine lifestyle come from? I asked him and here is what he had to say:

Q: What led you to begin making wine? Was it something you always wanted to do or a passion you discovered later in life?

A: As a child I never saw a dinner table without wine. I heard about Prohibition, when families were allowed to make two barrels of wine, from my many uncles – who told me how much fun it was to steal the grapes. So living in San Francisco I thought it would be a good idea to have a summer house with an acre or two of grapes. That eventually led to my purchasing the ‘Niebaum Estate,’ which had been part of the legendary Inglenook.

Q: You are best known as a great filmmaker. Does that experience factor into your wine? Are there similarities between your approaches to film and winemaking?

A: Yes, each is an art form, and in this case they divide into three segments: gathering of the source material (Grapes or Shots), fashioning the work (Winemaking or Editing) and finishing it (Post Production, Music, etc. or Fining and Putting into the final package). I am not a winemaker, our winemaker for Francis Coppola Wines is Corey Beck.

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